Tuesday, April 30, 2013

fun with osx: "dictation & speech"

Just for fun...

OSX has a built in speech synthesizer... Macs have been "talking" for a long time, but until fairly recently I didn't realize you could just open up a terminal and typesay This is what I am saying
I knew there was a fair selection of voices (trysay -vz droid
for example) but yesterday I found out they have a bunch of accents as well! Go to "System Preferences | Dictation & Speech | Text to Speech", then under System Voice hit "Customize..." You may have to download the new voices, but some of them are a lot of fun... I like Sangeeta who speaks India-accented English. Also, some of the ones that are geared for foreign languages, like the German-speaking Anna, are cool to hear as well. (Though they will read numbers in their native tongue.)

I don't know why I find it mildly surprising that a computer voice geared at reading a foreign language speaks English with the same accent as a human who grew up speaking that language, but it's pretty cool.